How to Make a Double Exposure Picture ?

What’s a Double Exposure Photography? It’s a technique that combines two images into one, there’s also called Multiple Exposure when we combine more than two images to create just one photo (superposition) this is very used nowadays for several photographers and artists who want to experiment with their pictures, the most important in a superposition is to play with textures and originality.

There are different types of double exposure / multiple exposure, and there are the principal ones:

Duplicating one object several times in the same picture

Putting two or more photos together without cropping them

Using two or more photos: cut an object / person with different layers

Only taking a silhouette or an object and putting into the principal photo

Today we’re going to explain a little bit about the double exposure in Photoshop, taking the most demanding style of superposition as an example: Using two or more photos, cut an object / person with different layers.

1. First we need to take the pictures we want to unify, one person / object and one with lots of texture in this case (nature).

2. After we’re going to crop the person / object picture we chose, you’re going to do this with (Tools > Quick Selection Tool) do this very close from the hair to avoid selecting the background (Zooming the photo will helps you a lot).

3. With the right click of the mouse / pad you’re going to adjust the < Feather Radius > with 0.5 px (pixels).

4. You’re going to Copy the selection in a < White layer >.

5. You Open the image with the texture and you’re going to < Copy > here too the selected person / object.

6. < Unclick > the layer with the texture and go into < Levels > here you’ll put darker the object / person so we can really see it the details.

7. If you want more details you can use the < High Pass Filter > you do a copy of your image, go to (Filter > High Pass) and you’ll choose the quantity of details you want

8. Change the < Blending Mode > of this new portrait layer to ‘Screen’ to render all the dark areas transparent.

9. After you’ve done that, you’re just going to use the < Brush > I’ll recommend a medium size and you’re just going to clean the background with the same color you’ve chose.

10. You go to < Flatten Image > with right click in the layers or just to save it directly as a JPG or TIFF and Voilà! You’re image is done!

You can play a lot with the layers and do different styles, textures, and images; basically the steps are the same:

The good thing about this, it’s that you can have how many layers you want; this is the trick of Photoshop to do a good Double Exposure/Multiple Exposure, what’s going to give you an excellent result is to ‘PLAY’ have fun doing this and experiment with colors, contrast, textures, brightness, movement, whatever you want the important is to find new arts; because originality is the best friend of an artist!

Here you have the final result of some photographers I found on Internet, you can see the different styles but the same technique.